Celebrating the Queen’s rain: umbrellas are an essential accessory for jubilee year. Photograph: Rex Features

Of all the symptoms of the decline of British civilisation, none is more poignant than the building of a retractable roof over Wimbledon's centre court in 2009. The idea was to keep the rain off and the tennis on. What a mistake. Tennis? Nobody goes to Wimbledon to watch tennis. They go there to feel the rain trickling down their backs, diluting Pimms, dampening sandwiches and halting sport's glum spectacle.

It is rain that we really love. We just don't dare to admit it. We complain about it blighting our summer because we are sublimating our passion. We are besotted, besoaked, beside ourselves with a love that dare not speak its name. Think about it. We keep devising situations to encounter the rain, to talk about it, get ourselves wet in it, to affect disdain for it. What we couldn't stand about the hosepipe ban was not so much water companies' ineptitude in calculating average rainfall in this rain-soaked dime of an island, but the terror that there might actually have been a shortage of what we love perhaps more than anything else in the world. Thankfully, the rain came back – as it always does.

When it rained on the Queen's Thames parade, the world saw Britain as a nation carrying on regardless of the weather with the indomitable spirit apparently natural to us rain-soaked, sexually repressed, grey-souled freaks. None of the drenched spectators could have been happier to be there. The Queen's perma-grimace belied her true feelings. Even Prince Phillip only checked into hospital with a bladder infection after he had stood for four hours in the rain (the prospect of Madness gigging on your roof would make any sane person check into the nearest hospital). We are not indomitable, really: we just like things other peoples don't. Mizzle slanting from a fag ash-coloured sky, for instance. Welcome to your sodden summer: you know you love it.

In Barry White's superbly sexy Walking in the Rain (With the One I Love), every other loser is running for shelter except for Glodean James (unbeatable lead singer of Love Unlimited). She walks through the rain to better feel her passion for the disarmingly libidinous walrus of love. The British are like that, but with this pervy twist: we walk in the rain not to feel passion for some mere human, but for the rain itself. If rain were a human being, it would get a restraining order.

Remember Cliff Richard at Wimbledon 1996, the day it never stopped raining? The covers were over centre court, any prospect of play pleasingly remote. And yet few trudged back to Southfields tube. Instead, they stayed to celebrate the two greats of British culture: rain appreciation and ironic distance. Cliff's choice of opening a cappella number for the centre court crowds was inspired: Summer Holiday. What bravura, what impromptu wit! It also provided a moment of self-flattering solidarity for people who will not let the weather dampen their spirits (as if rain could), expressing themselves with the doughty hubris that got the nation through the war and probably other stuff.

The historic function of summer sports in Britain is to facilitate rain appreciation in maddening, obsessive detail. Cricket is the most extreme example. There has never been a cricket game in this country in which rain has failed to stop play (I exaggerate, but only slightly). Why would a game be invented that depends for its existence on it not raining and yet be played in a country where it is always going to rain? Why would Worcester's beautiful cricket ground be situated near the flood-prone River Severn if not to make us fall in love anew with rain's power? Only in Britain would the beautifully byzantine Duckworth-Lewis method be invented. This involves deploying a mathematical formula to help decide rain-interrupted one-day cricket matches. Why did Duckworth and Lewis invent it? Not to help decide the result of a cricket match. Nobody, not even Geoff Boycott, cares about such inane guff. It was to help us think about rain and how much we love it while affecting otherwise.

Ladies' Day at Aintree races, and a fine example of Britain's practical approach to bad weather. Photograph: McPix Ltd/Rex Features

Or consider Glastonbury. Nobody really stands groin-deep in mud in a Somerset field to hear U2 or Coldplay. That would be the very definition of madness. No, Glastonbury and other summer festivals were invented to get us up close and personal with rain and its leading non-urban consequence, mud. True, at most British festivals there's a risk of trenchfoot, but the path of true love never did run smooth. Glastonbury has been cancelled this year which means it probably won't rain: our all-wise God only makes it rain in Somerset at festival time. He knows what we like.

And yet we pretend that we hate the rain. If we really did, we would move to the desert. But we don't because if we did, something inside us would die. There is no song title more spiritually harrowing to British sensibilities than It Never Rains in Southern California. Then why do so many Brits wind up in rain-lite LA? Because they've forgotten about Albert Hammond's song but remain seduced by the film of The Big Sleep. In that vision of southern California, former desert has been enchanted by rain. Humphrey Bogart repeatedly turns up his shamus's trenchcoat collar against another satisfyingly intense Hollywood downpour, or drives night-time streets slicked sensually wet and streaked with reflected tail lights – the whole seductive mise en scène of film noir that you can get for free tonight in Peterborough.

How lucky we are – to love something that is in such plentiful supply, falling from month to month from grey skies. "London is always grey," complained an Indian woman next to me as we descended into Heathrow last week. No: London is always greys. So many greys: opalescent, dove, lead, battleship, cadet, charcoal, glaucous, that greyish mauve called Mountbatten pink, medium grey, dark medium grey, Gainsborough grey, and more besides. There they are in the clouds waiting for us to name them and love them as they deserve. Is the reason Fifty Shades of Grey is so popular because its title speaks to the rainy yearnings in our erotically melancholy sensibilities? It was wrong of Kate Bush to make an album called 50 Words for Snow when there is a greater need to celebrate the rain, to name its varieties. Mizzle, drizzle, cats and dogs. What is the difference between luttering down, siling down and plothering down? We need to know, and the woman who wrote Cloudbusting (that hymn to British eccentricity and spiritual need for rain) is the one to help us.

"Let it rain," sings Melanie Fiona on Tinchy Stryder's song of the same name. "Drip drop coming/ Everybody give way/ Can't stop forming/ May as well embrace," she sings. But that's not quite right: it's not a question of us resigning ourselves to embracing rain because it is ubiquitous; rather, it's rain's ubiquity that makes us fortunate. But still: "Let it rain," Melanie Fiona sings. Too right.